Worth watching: Could new road schemes be on the horizon??

Apparently congestion is now on the increase in London - unsurprisingly, given that the Mayor (and Government) have moved away from a focus on traffic reduction. As Dave Hill in the Guardian puts it:

"Boris Johnson's transport policies will fail to prevent huge increases in road traffic congestion across London in the coming years according to research by his own transport agency.

Transport for London has concluded that by 2031 congestion in central London will have worsened by 60% even if Johnson's entire transport strategy investment programme is implemented and augmented with further short-term measures. Congestion in inner London is projected to rise by 25% and in outer London by 15%."

More congestion leads to pressure for new roads (or traffic reduction of course) - though new roads have also been shown to lead to more traffic & the congestion returns.

Boriswatch have been looking at recent TfL discussions about what to do about this, including a potential idea to diverting traffic from the inner ring road, through "enhancements to orbital capacity".

They then work out what this could mean in terms of a new orbital route (not unlike the previously planned ringways) between the inner ring road and the current north circular (note that this is all very speculative at this stage), e.g:

"Ah, the Seven Sisters Road.  Lovely congestion.  Let’s give it some executive relief, somewhere around the Green Lanes junction at Manor House – we were stopped from bypassing Green Lanes in the 70s, after all.  Lord knows what it would look like, but presumably reducing traffic cutting down to Kings Cross and Camden would be the aim"

As the actual TfL papers make clear (in the powerpoint in appendix 3), current planned measures are not predicted to be sufficient to resolve the congestion problem, hence: